New Book Details Two Decades of Putin-Backed Assassinations

BuzzFeed News journalist Heidi Blake's new book chronicles 14 suspected assassinations backed by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

"We could see there was a pattern of suspicious deaths linked to Russia," Blake told NPR, promoting "From Russia with Blood: The Kremlin's Ruthless Assassination Program and Vladimir Putin's Secret War on the West." "And in every single case there was evidence that would appear to connect those deaths to Russia."

Blake pointed to a 2006 Russia law that permitted "enemies of the Russian state to be murdered by Russian state agents on foreign soil with absolute impunity."

"From Russia with Blood" was reviewed for NPR by Latvian freelance journalist Leonid Ragozin, who questions some of the claims in the book, calling its "greatest weakness" is "the attempt to explain this entire chain of deaths as a part of a single murderous plan just fails both in political and investigative terms."

"There is an old police practice, common in Russia: Detectives catch a murderer red-handed and then charge him with, say, 20 murders that happened in the vicinity of this one in the past decade," Ragozin wrote. "It does help them on the career ladder, but fails to bring either justice or security to the neighborhood.

"In a very similar way, this book fails to capture the messy nature of Russian politics in an attempt to paint a grotesque picture of Putin as the maniac responsible for all the evil that exists."

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